On the
Radio New Internationalist
show "Up in Smoke",
during an interview with
Peter Brown of
FSF
(about 43 minutes in),
I was surprised to hear
the following revelation that FSF uses Skype
and the failure to challenge the claim that
Skype is free software:

"Peter Brown: ... This interview today is being transmitted through
Skype.
We're talking through Skype.
Now, that obviously is a direct threat to the
entrenched telecoms and they would like
to restrict that,
to lower the quality of the voice connection
and they want to do that with lots of other
types of transmission.

Rachel Maher: And can they do that? Because Skype of course
is free and there's a really direct benefit
for organisations like ours, which is a
non-profit organisation using Skype technology. Will they be able to do that?

Peter Brown: Yes, so what they can do is easily identify
types of information being passed, so what they
can typically do is
downgrade the service that you're using,
so that - for instance, voice communication - those packets of
data can be slowed down,
effectively making voice communciation more
difficult.
Now this can only really be achieved if they're able to manipulate legislation.
Unfortunately, they have a long history of
being very successful at this.
I mentioned earlier on that
Digital Restrictions Management
are a threat to our freedoms because
it's allowing them to erect gateways and
to control what it is that we can view and
do with our computers. ..."

I was disappointed not to find much on
the FSF web site
about the need for free VoIP software,
building on
GNU oSIP
and other free software,
instead of Skype's proprietary software,
which has contained
spyware
and
worms
already.
Will you be adding such information soon?
What is
the official FSF view of Skype and similar proprietary VoIP systems?

Nevertheless, well done for covering DRM, net neutrality
and the privacy problems of
Google,
Yahoo! and Microsoft in a relatively short
interview.